Have Twitter and social media been co-opted to replace a more conventional attack on Iran, asks Amira Howeidy As the post-election political crisis has unfolded in Iran -- or Tehran, to be precise -- the Western media has seemed intent on portraying any political upheaval as synonymous with Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service. Ever since the victory of "conservative" President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared, with a staggering 63 per cent of the votes as opposed to 33 per cent for his rival, "the reformist" Mir-Hussein Mousavi, cyberspace has been inundated with running commentary. If this whole dynamic had a code name, it would be Operation Twitter. From the moment Mousavi and his followers -- who believed he was too popular to have lost -- cried foul, the ripples in cyberspace steadily turned into a tidal wave. Soon the most discussed topic on Twitter, or to use Twitter lingo, the "trending topic", was "#iranelection" (hashtag included). The fact that the bulk of traffic on what the US based traffic analysis service compete.com ranks as the third most used social network site should be about the Iranian elections has been the subject of intense media analysis for more than a week. Western news channels, newspapers, agencies and radio stations appear to be obsessed with Twitter. Story after story on the social network site as a source of information from inside Iran appeared, even before the Iranian authorities imposed restrictions on the movement of foreign correspondents. The fixation on what "twitters" were "tweeting" -- on the BBC for example -- was evident well before the Iranian government asked its correspondent to leave the country on 22 June. Moved by the extraordinary Western media interest in a social networking service I spent the last week following Iran-related streams on Twitter. Within 24 hours it was clear much less information was being provided than sensation. The #iranelection stream, where the vast majority of Twitters have either green avatars or green overlays over their photos in a sign of support for Mousavi, is distinctly anti the Iranian regime, which is repeatedly lambasted as a theocratic dictatorship. More often than not the self-proclaimed liberal and democracy-loving green Twitters are hostile towards any suggestion that, in the absence of evidence, the elections might not, perhaps, have been rigged. When I requested information or evidence of rigging, one "@iRenaissanceMan" twitter declared that I was an "Iran agent" and prayed that my "soul burns in hell". Similarly, Tweets that questioned the information provided on alleged Hizbullah militias operating in Tehran to quash the reform movement or "Iranian police wearing Hamas flags" -- in fact, any Tweets that were not anti-regime -- were met with hostile cries along the lines of "block that user!" or "report this twitter, he's from Basij!" Soviet-style paranoia aside, Iran-related material on Twitter is strangely un-Iranian sounding. Tweeting is almost entirely in English and not Farsi. Even more revealing is how much of the content doesn't even purport to provide evidence, or even anecdotes, supporting the allegations of electoral fraud that supposedly triggered the crisis in the first place. #iranelection is full of tweets like this: "Once you changed location and time [in Twitter settings], start insulting the regime in Iran" and "Freedom in Iran means PEACE for the WHOLE WORLD & the END of TERRORISM!!!" and "RT Iran gov. has brought in 5000 Hamas Arabs from Lebanon to kill Iranian freedom fighters." According to twitter "mraf94" (unverified location): "This isn't about the vote anymore." So what is it about? And why, with such a barrage of misinformation emanating from Twitter, is the Western media obsessed with a social networking site hosting people who claim to be anything from anywhere? Or is the demonisation of the Iranian regime that is typical of Iran-related Tweets sufficiently appealing to the Western press that it is willing to forego its much vaunted commitment to ethical reporting? Maximilian Forte, associate professor of anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, and an expert on social media, reports that CNN "now boasts" of having a "Twitter desk" in addition to its "Iran desk". The BBC features links to Twitter prominently on its online news pages about Iran and specifically points to #iranelection. The assumption, Forte told Al-Ahram Weekly in an e-mail interview, "this is a way for Iranians to get information out to the world and since Western media have been prevented from covering events on the ground, Twitter and other social media are the next best thing". And by repeatedly stating "that these are unconfirmed, we cannot verify them" they believe they have "carte blanche to repeat what they want from #iranelection". What many miss, says Forte, is that #iranelection is heavily dominated by American Twitter users, writing mostly from an "American geopolitical perspective, employing familiar American imperial tropes about freedom and democracy". According to Sysmos, a Canadian provider for social media analytics, there are currently 19,235 Twitter users in Iran. Before 12 June (election day), 51.3 per cent of Iranian election tweets came from Iran, 27 per cent from outside the country while 21.6 per cent didn't provide a location. By 19 June, at the height of the protests in Tehran, the figures shifted: 40.3 per cent came from outside Iran, 23.8 per cent came, or claimed to come, from inside Iran, while 35.7 per cent didn't provide a location. US officials -- the previous administration created an Iran Freedom office to "advance democracy" that still functions -- have made no secret that they are watching the Iranian crisis closely. Not only did the State Department ask Twitter not to carry out scheduled maintenance last week that would have downed the service for an hour, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates told CBS news on 18 June that social media is a "huge strategic asset" for the US, alluding to how "easy access" to "Western communication and media played a part in the collapse of the Soviet Union and liberation of Eastern Europe". Western media sources were quick to jump on the bandwagon. Internet giant Google suddenly added Farsi to its Google Translate service last Friday. Its research director Peter Norvig said his company had launched the service before completion because of the situation in Iran. The BBC announced that it was using two extra satellites -- Nilesat and Eutelsat W2M -- to broadcast its Persian-language service into Iran and restore its signal which had been subjected to "deliberate interference". Even Facebook, the world's most popular social networking, rushed to launch a Persian version of its website. But how much of this logistical support is actually helping Iranians inside Iran? And how representative are the Twitter green Iranians of the general public? Alireza Doostdar, a PhD candidate in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University -- he voted for Mousavi -- offers an answer by separating what is resonating on Twitter and what the reform movement in Iran actually wants. "It's not a revolution," he told Al-Ahram Weekly by e-mail from Tehran. The protests have a "very clear demand: to annul the presidential election, which protesters believe to have been fraudulent, and hold a new election." There is no demand, he added, to change the system of government, despite what said on Twitter. Mousavi "does not have a problem with the institutions of the Islamic Republic per se, even the Basij, the Revolutionary Guards and the Guardian Council". A Western educated young Iranian, Doostdar takes issue with the "exaggerated and hyped" fixation on the extent of Iranian's Internet activity. This focus "erroneously depicts a predominantly liberal, secular, educated, politically active and outspoken population that uses the Internet to circumvent government restrictions and criticize the state and religion". The truth is, Doostdar continues, that many Iranians who use the Internet, as in other parts of the world, do so for entertainment or social networking while those who engage in political discussion or activism include "conservatives, Islamists, secularists and conservatives, pro and anti-government bloggers". Forte draws a clear line between "Twitter green" and "Mousavi green". Twitter green, he says, "want the complete overthrow of the Iranian system of governance and the minimization of Islam and in the process stuffs words into the mouths of Iranians". Had this entire Twitter effort been organised and orchestrated directly and exclusively by the CIA, believes Forte, it could not have done a better job. "It is pointing to the reality that imperial thinking and conquest mentality is distributed, crowd-sourced you might say, and that is the perverse genius of this experiment."
